On Contemporary Feminist Theory

...The "orthodox Irish, Italian and Jewish" communities, which for Maclntyre are exemplars of these humane attitudes, are hardly known for their progressive and liberating views of women...

...For a thoughtful reappropriation of postmodemist ideas, see Drucilla Cornell, "Toward a Modern/Postmodern Reconstruction of Ethics," University of Pennsylvania Law Review, 133 (1985): 291-380...

...While Annette Baier, Iris Young, Virginia Held, and I would argue that the Rawlsian theory makes certain substantive as well as methodological assumptions that lead to the exclusion of women and of their point of view, Susan Okin maintains that the thought-experiment of Rawls's "original position" can be interpreted along the lines of a model of empathy for the least advantaged in our societies...

...Every culture, society, and historical epoch constitutes and interprets sexual difference in a certain way, and very often in more ways than one, which may themselves be contradictory...

...Romanticized versions of gender relations are provided by Michael Walzer and Roberto Unger, for whom romantic love and courting arrangements appear more central than the distribution of labor and resources within the family...

...Once the woman question is raised, once we ask how a thinker conceptualizes the distinction between male and female and what capacities and activities he attributes to the female of the species, we begin to see Aristotle, Machiavelli, Rousseau, to name but a few, with new eyes—and in the words of Joan Kelly Gadol "each eye sees a different picture...

...The fact that this issue is never addressed by Maclntyre implies that he considers it a nonissue...

...Yet they do not go far enough...

...5 Consider Alasdair Maclntyre's call in After Virtue to revive communities where friendship and civility are alive...

...1 ff...

...For feminists what is called into question by this mode of SUMMER • 1989 . 369 Political Theory discourse is the very idea of "engaged" or "emancipatory" theory, which is not only a form of knowledge but also the consciousness of an oppressed group...

...6 Joan Scott, "Introduction," Gender and the Politics of History (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), p. 2. 7 Jacques Derrida, Spurs, trans...

...Suffering from a "collective Aristotelian hangover," empirical scientists often think of the "polity in terms of families" and simply subsume women's attitudes and activities under those of the male head of household...

...The woman question is not just a political and moral problem but a problem of knowledge as well, challenging our very understanding of objectivity, of neutrality, of disinterestedness and disengagement...

...Gender" is to feminist theory what "class" and "production" were to traditional Marxism and what "the SUMMER • 1989 • 367 Political Theory unconscious" and "repression" are to psychoanalysis...

...So, for example, when Greenstein finds that girls score higher than boys on measures of citizen duty and political efficacy he does not revise his assertions about apolitical females, but instead relabels these attitudes as "moral" rather than "political...

...In Adorno's words, the task of such analysis is to dissolve the present into a field of oppositions between the past and the future and to release its latent utopian potentials...

...In Social Justice in the Liberal State, the "Commander" charged with distributing the social resource of power and patrolling the political conversation is a woman...

...Feminist Perspectives on Epistemology, Metaphysics, Methodology, and Philosophy of Science, ed...

...What appears to me really problematic at this juncture, however, is less this contemporary "Querelle des femmes," but more the loss of serious social and political criticism in feminist theory...

...For psychoanalytically oriented feminists, gender identities build the hard core of human selfhood, and such identities can be explained only in light of the institutions of female mothering or mothermonopolized child rearing in the modem world...

...Contemporary feminist theory is experiencing a Methodenstreit, a methodological warfare, itself an aspect of the general upheaval in the humanities today...

...Their theories of the constitution of subjectivity through discursive, disciplinary, imaginary, or textual practices certainly are radical...

...Contemporary feminist theory, at the end of the 1960s, began by a reappropriation of these three "masters of suspicion" from the standpoint of women (I am thinking of the work of Juliet Mitchell, Sheila Rowbotham, and Sherry Ortner...

...Yet, despite reassurances to the contrary (as in Joan Scott's "Introduction" to Gender and the Politics of History), I am unconvinced that the marriage between feminism and poststructuralism can be a happy one...

...Although for Rawls the family is a basic social institution, it is never explicitly discussed and principles of justice are not applied to it...

...There is little question that the study of the social and cultural construction of gender must now incorporate the work of these thinkers...

...This is the strategy of making "women visible" and their voices audible, expanding the canon in the humanities so as to place the invisible female in the public eye...

...Postmodernists, in the words of Jane Flax, consider gender relations "complex and unstable processes (or temporary 'totalities' in the language of dialectics) constituted by and through interrelated parts...

...The tendency to regard the concern of women workers with working conditions or the length of the working day as "social," while men's focusing on the wage packet is readily accepted as evidence of political awareness and class consciousness, follows the same mysterious logic...

...Women and the Polity: Ignoring the Evidence In an article entitled "The Unit of Political Analysis: Our Aristotelian Hangover," Judith Hicks Stiehm points out that even though empirical analysis demonstrates that women and men participate differently in politics, * See Susan Moller Okin, Women in Western Political Thought...

...Women's studies scholars—and by this term I refer less to departmental affiliation than to methodological orientation— see the task of feminist scholarship to be the lifting of women's experience and culture out of marginality and their relocation at the center rather than at the peripheries of a discipline...

...3 Judith Hicks Stiehm, "The Unit of Political Analysis: Our Aristotelian Hangover," in Discovering Reality...

...The current alliance between feminist theory and French poststructuralism poses political as well as intellectual problems...

...7, 1989...

...Engendering the Political Subject In challenging the Platonic and Cartesian views, feminist theory has allied itself with 368 • DISSENT Political Theory/ various critics of the tradition like Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud...

...5 There is disagreement among feminist theorists as to the implication of the Rawlsian view...

...They also concern the status of the theorist—in the name of what or whom does the theorist speak...

...At the center of this debate is the following question: If what have hitherto been considered the major works of the Western tradition are, almost uniformly, the product of a specific group of individuals— propertied, white, European, and NorthAmerican males—how universal and representative is their message, how inclusive is their scope, and how unbiased their vision...

...7 Are women ready to fight on the streets and in the legislatures for the needs and rights of a "non-identity," of a "chasm," of "distance" itself...

...the title of the sequel to After Virtue...

...4 Janet Siltanen and Michelle Stanworth, "The Politics of Private Woman and Public Man," Janet Siltanen and Michelle Stenworth, eds...

...For the essentialists there is a set of transhistorically shared values, experiences, and attitudes that characterize the female of the species...

...Today we are living through the consequences of the exercise of suspicion toward the masters of suspicion themselves...

...First, at least two of these masters—Freud and Nietzsche— had remarkably misogynist views, while Marx continued the gender-neutral and universalizing traditions of the Enlightenment and subordinated the woman question to the class struggle...

...Sandra Harding and Merrill B. Hintikka (Holland/Boston: D. Reidel Publishing, 1983), pp...

...And instead of Nietzsche's often crude debunking of the conventional oppositions — Dionysiac/Apollonian, sensuous/ rational, matter/form, dispersal/unity, outer/ inner, madness/sanity, female/male—there is the practice of "deconstruction," which questions the very logic of dualism and the creation of closures and enclosures at the center of the text (Derrida...

...Is not a feminist theory that allies itself with poststructuralism in danger of losing its very reason for being...

...2 (January 1989...

...2 The vision of feminist theory is "doubled": We see what the tradition has trained us to see, and we search at the same time for what the tradition has told us was not even worth looking at...

...Perhaps accepted paradigms of research in the human and social sciences, and in particular the dominant empiricist, positivist, and functionalist paradigms simply cannot accommodate the woman question...

...Women's traditional and continuing immersion in a web of dependencies with other humans, and especially with children, makes it difficult if not outright unimaginable for them to abstract themselves from these bonds and to stand behind the "veil of ignorance" even in a counterfactual thought-experiment...

...Kittay and Diana T. Meyers, eds...

...Which Rationality...

...How to Explain Gender Contemporary political thought ignores, trivializes, or glosses over women as political subjects because it makes no room for gender as an analytical category...

...The social construction of sexual difference serves in turn as a constitutive element of all social and political relationships...

...These normative confusions concern the status of the subject—what mode of subjectivity can we project into the future and fight for, which itself would not be yet another product of some disciplinary matrix, yet another version of some power complex...

...Jean Bethke Elshtain, Public Man, Private Woman, and Genevieve Lloyd, The Man of Reason...

...2 Joan Kelly Gadol, "Some Methodological Implications of the Social Relations Between the Sexes," in Women, History and Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984) pp...

...In continuing to insist that their work alone constitutes the canon, are we not participating in the silencing, marginalization, and oppression of those "others," mainly women, nonwhite peoples, and members of nonGraeco-Roman and non-Christian traditions...

...Very broadly speaking, I see two rifts: on the one hand between "women's studies" scholars and feminist theorists and, on the other hand, among feminist theorists, between essentialists like Mary Daly and Adrienne Rich, postmodernists like Julia Kristeva, Gayatri Spivak, Toril Moi, and Jane Flax, and psychoanalytic feminists like Dorothy Dinnerstein, Nancy Chodorow, Evelyn Fox Keller, Jessica Benjamin, and Isaac Balbus...

...Carried to its logical consequences, poststructuralism leads to a theory without addressees, to a self without a center, and to the phantasmagoric play of signifiers and signifieds in the interstices of which power and society disappear as so many 'sites of discursive differance: While Foucault celebrates the disappearance of man, feminists have just discovered "woman...

...Precisely the Platonic and Cartesian models of the knower as a mind's eye detached from the body, privileging disengagement from the world, preclude any recognition of corporality and sexuality as problems...

...Practicing this "doubled vision" of feminist theory, women scholars of political thought have not only documented the "misogynist" origins of the Western tradition and its continuing gender bias well into the Enlightenment and the modern period...

...The energistic model of traditional psychoanalysis that seemed to view the unconscious as a pressure cooker with biological and prelinguistic "drives" pushing against the lid of the superego has been replaced by a linguistic model...

...one begins to see ragged edges, butting corners, obtrusive margins...

...370 • DISSENT...

...As Joan Scott points out, [T]his does not mean that gender reflects or implements fixed and natural characteristics between women and men...

...31-45...

...While social scientists like Frances Fox Piven, Theda Skocpol, Jane Jenson, and Helga Maria Hernes have called our attention to the position of women in the welfare state, to the feminization of poverty as well as to the meaning of the new right and neoconservative agendas for women, their insights have not been appropriated by more culturally oriented feminists to provide an analysis of the present...

...In retrospect, however, it seems obvious that feminists could not simply take over the discourse of the masters of suspicion...

...rather gender is the knowledge that establishes meaning for bodily differences...

...Undeniably, these two modes can and must inform each other, but it is also the case that from the perspective of discourse analysis macroinstitutions like the state, the economy, the legal system, and international relations tend to disappear and are replaced by "micro" practices the sum of which does not add up to these larger wholes...

...This, she argues, should be congenial to feminists...

...In a similar manoeuvre, Dowse and Hughes dismiss the similarities in the attitudes of women and men towards capital punishment and birth control as a "moral" rather than a "political" overlap, while Lane differentiates man's approach to voting from women's "moral route to the polls...

...8 0 Notes George Levine, Peter Brooks, Jonathan Culler, Marjorie Garber, E. Ann Kaplan and Catharine R. Stimpson, Speaking for the Humanities, American Council of Learned Societies Occasional Paper, No...

...Does the revival of communities of friendship and civility require a return to patriarchy or a defense of strong traditional and inegalitarian families...

...This paper contains a response to the criticisms of the practice of the humanities raised by William Bennett, Allan Bloom and Lynne Cheney...

...The individuals behind the "veil of ignorance," although clearly intended to be of both genders, sound suspiciously more like male than female persons...

...6 Although gender is the differentia specifica between feminist and "male"stream theory, it is around the very choice of an explanatory framework for gender that feminists today part company...

...Gender defines a problem horizon that sensitizes us to a certain kind of difference...

...They have gone further and identified the "gender subtext" in visions of the political subject, in the definition of the political realm, and in the logic of terms like "participation," "autonomy," "consent," and "rights...

...Contemporary feminism has shifted its attention from social analysis to discourse analysis, from power itself to the politics of its representation...

...But then again is it not our turn to ask as women, "Whose Justice...

...For articles by Baier, Held, and Benhabib, see E.F...

...Derrida suggests, "Perhaps . . . 'woman' is not a determinable identity .. . Perhaps woman— a non-identity, non-figure, a simulacrum—is distance's very chasm, the out-distancing of distance, the interval's cadence, distance itself...

...for Young and Okin, see "Symposium on Feminism and Political Theory," in Ethics, vol...

...It is instead a variable social organization that itself must be explained...

...To adopt "gender" as an analytical category means to focus on the social and cultural construction of sexual difference among humans...

...in Women and the Public Sphere, (London: Hutchinson, 1984), p. 192...

...366 • DISSENT Political Theory independent investigations of women's patterns of participation are not carried out...

...8 Carole Pateman and Nancy Fraser have been doing pioneering work in recent years, integrating welfare-state sociology and theories of late capitalism with feminist perspectives and discourse analysis...

...Sexual difference is not, then, the originary cause from which social organization ultimately can be derived...

...Can feminist theory be poststructuralist and emancipatory...

...Drives are not biological but imaginary, and language is the medium through which the human animal appropriates and interprets reality, confronts his or her psyche, and languishes after that "obscure" object of desire (Lacan, Kristeva...

...As has been amply demonstrated in the case of Foucault, poststructuralism is full of "empirical insights" and "normative confusions" (Nancy Fraser...

...4 In this respect contemporary political theory does not fare differently from mainstream empirical research...

...This egalitarian gesture prevents us from thinking seriously about existing gender asymmetries in actual society, and indeed nowhere in this book is gender itself discussed as a source of inequality, leading to differential access to power and other resources...

...Barbara Harlow (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), p. 49...

...Feminist theorists, whether essentialist, postmodernist, or psychoanalytic, agree that the omission of women is evidence of a more problematic view of knowledge within the tradition...

...In order to be able to fit the pieces back together, one now has to develop a new vision of the whole...

...Perhaps the most charming example of linguistic liberalism, which completely ignores the reality of gender asymmetries in the real world, is given by Bruce Ackerman...

...As feminist theorists argue, the "invisibility" of women, of their work, of their culture, may point to a more serious blind spot in the vision of traditional theory...

...Engendering" the political subject has consequences for the epistemological subject as well...

...In institutions of higher learning all across the country a debate is underway as to what constitutes the "tradition," the "canon" of literary, artistic, and philosophical works worth transmitting to future generations...

...In the works of such political theorists as John Rawls, Robert Nozick, Ronald Dworkin, Alasdair Maclntyre, Michael Walzer, and Roberto Unger, women and areas of concern to them—the family, the sexual division of labor in the family, reproductive rights, child rearing, and socialization— are either ignored, romantically trivialized, or linguistically whitewashed...

...But every critical theory is first and foremost a critical theory of the present moment, and every critical theory must begin with a concrete analysis of contemporary contradictions and tensions...

...Opinions are divided on this issue...

...Feminist theory as a critical theory of the present is still waiting to be written...

...The pieces of a picture that previously fit together all of a sudden stop being coherent...

...Women and Moral Theory (Rowman and Littlefield, Jersey City: 1987...

...Feminist theory has been at the forefront of this paradigm shift, and under the impact of feminist scholarship the surface of the canon has been forever fractured, its legitimacy challenged...

...Are they ready to bid her farewell too...

...Feminism and Poststructuralism Without a doubt, contemporary poststructuralist thinkers like Foucault, Kristeva, and Derrida have cast doubt upon our views of the rational and autonomous subject and the rational and self-conscious author of the text...

...On this view, the omission of the woman question is a matter of political and moral, but essentially corrigible, neglect within the established disciplines...

...The model of class struggle has been replaced by the "microphysics" of power, which, it is said, generates the class "subject" by imperceptibly acting upon her through the disciplinary practices of everyday life (Foucault...

...3 Janet Siltanen and Michelle Stenworth provide a telling account of how the view of the male as the "norm" of politics dominates political sociology: [L]inked to the male-as-norm principle is the tendency to demarcate in a sex-linked but otherwise arbitrary way the "political" from the "social" or the "moral...

...These critics have emphasized the historicity and the situatedness of the subject and therefore the perspectival and interest-laden character of knowledge...

...For those who were educated in the American academy in the late sixties and the early seventies and who are now in the position of transmitting this legacy to future generations, the ferment of the last decade has meant nothing less than an epistemological revolution of sorts...

...I would not want to disparage the contributions of these women's studies scholars to the radical reorientation and reevaluation of our views of women and their activities...